Best Practices for Running Oracle Database on Amazon Web Services

Abstract

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers you
the ability to run your Oracle Database in a cloud environment.
Running Oracle Database in the AWS Cloud is very similar to running
Oracle Database in your data center. To a database administrator or
developer, there are no differences between the two environments.
However, there are a number of AWS platform considerations relating
to security, storage, compute configurations, management, and
monitoring that will help you get the best out of your Oracle
Database implementation on AWS. This whitepaper provides best
practices for achieving optimal performance, availability, and
reliability, and lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) while
running Oracle Database on AWS. The target audience for this
whitepaper includes database administrators, enterprise architects,
systems administrators, and developers who would like to run their
Oracle Database on AWS.

Introduction

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a
comprehensive set of services and tools for deploying Oracle
Database on the reliable and secure AWS Cloud infrastructure. AWS
offers its customers two options for running Oracle Database on AWS:

Using
Amazon
Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for
Oracle, which is a managed database service that helps
simplify the provisioning and management of Oracle databases.
Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a
relational database in the cloud by automating installation,
disk provisioning and management, patching, minor version
upgrades, failed instance replacement, as well as backup and
recovery tasks.

The Multi-AZ feature of Amazon RDS operates two databases in
multiple Availability Zones with synchronous replication, thus
creating a highly available environment with automatic failover.
The push-button scaling feature of Amazon RDS allows you to
easily scale the database instance up or down for better cost
management and performance. Amazon RDS also comes with a
License
Included service model, which allows you to pay per use by the hour.

Running a self-managed Oracle Database directly on Amazon
Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This option gives you full
control over the setup of the infrastructure and database
environment. Running the database on Amazon EC2 is very similar
to running the database on your own server. You have full
control of the database and have operating system-level access,
so you can run monitoring and management agents and use your
choice of tools for data replication, backup, and restoration.
Furthermore, you have the ability to use every optional module
available in Oracle Database. However, this option requires you
to set up, configure, manage, and tune all the components,
including Amazon EC2 instances, storage volumes, scalability,
networking, and security, based on AWS architecture best
practices. In the fully managed Amazon RDS service, this is all
taken care of for you.

Whether you choose to run a self-managed Oracle Database on Amazon
EC2 or the fully managed Amazon RDS for Oracle, following the best
practices discussed in this whitepaper will help you get the most
out of your Oracle Database implementation on AWS. We’ll discuss
Oracle licensing options, considerations for choosing Amazon EC2 or
Amazon RDS for your Oracle Database implementation, and how to
optimize network configuration, instance type, and database storage
in your implementation.

Javascript is disabled or is unavailable in your browser.

To use the AWS Documentation, Javascript must be enabled. Please refer to your browser's
Help pages for instructions.